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US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew argued the oil price fall, caused in part by the American shale revolution, was good for consumers.

‘For anyone consuming oil, lower oil is a tax cut,’ he said.

But the AA said British motorists are not benefiting as much as they should be because petrol prices have not fallen fast enough.

‘Our members have watched in dismay and complained bitterly as the price of oil has crashed but pump prices have moved very little since Christmas,’ said Edmund King, the AA’s president.

The RAC said it expects more retailers to cut diesel prices to match Asda, which should lead to an average price of less than £1 a litre for the first time since March 2009.

Before midday on Friday, Tesco also announced that it has dropped the price of diesel to 97.7ppl at its filling stations.

Simon Williams, an RAC fuel spokesman, said: 'We would have liked to have seen a cut sooner, and one that goes further, to more closely reflect the price retailers have been buying diesel for. But this is nevertheless good news for motorists.

'Diesel has been sold on the wholesale market for less than unleaded petrol since early last month, yet drivers have had to wait more than six weeks for this to be only partially reflected at the pumps.'

Mr Williams claimed that analysis of wholesale prices shows a further cut of between 1p and 2p could be made within the next fortnight.

Disproportionate: Crude hovered close to a 12-year low of under $28 a barrel last night, from above $115 some 18 months ago but the AA said motorists are not benefiting as much as they should

Asda said the 2p per litre reduction has taken diesel to its lowest price in over six years. Unleaded remains at 99.7p per litre

The supermarket said these are the maximum prices motorists will pay at all of its 279 filling stations across the UK.

Petrol price campaigners claim drivers should be seeing even larger savings on diesel and that retailers are profiting more on the fuel than petrol.

FairFuelUK claims the diesel profit margin is 11p per litre, whereas it is 5.8p per litre for petrol.

BP chief executive Bob Dudley said it was ‘not impossible’ oil would fall to $10 a barrel as some analysts have predicted.

Hopes: Chancellor George Osborne said the fall in the oil price was a 'good thing'

But he said that he expected the price to rise in the second half of the year as demand increases in the United States and China and supply eases as producers who have been hit by the recent collapse in prices shut down production.

‘It has been low in the last year… but it is not lower forever,’ Dudley said. ‘I think it’s going to be a year of two halves.

'We could see a price [of] $30 to $40 by the middle of the year and I think towards the end it could be into the $50s.’

Dudley’s upbeat assessment came despite the International Energy Agency this week warning that the oil market ‘could drown in oversupply’.

But he said oil ‘would be unlikely to increase to $100 a barrel or more’ any time soon.

Dudley also insisted that extraction in the North Sea remained a viable business but added that ‘it’s a particularly challenging area’.

Khalid al-Falih, the chairman of Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco, said oil prices have fallen too far and will recover this year.

The outlook for oil has been a hot topic in the Swiss ski resort of Davos this week – along with the prospects for the global economy.

Painting a bleak picture, Lew said: ‘I look around the world and there are a lot of headwinds.

‘We’ve seen very slugging growth in demand for some years now, and that’s led to a not-strong-enough global economy.’

But he added that investors may be overreacting.

‘I know it’s been bumpy days in the market, but I try to look beyond the hour to hour, day to day, to what the big trends are,’ said Lew.